Worship Is The Cleansing Of The Imagination is a title that sounds both devotional and violent, which makes it exactly right for a JK Flesh / Prurient split. Worship can mean surrender, reverence, discipline, repetition, humiliation, ecstasy, or loss of self. Cleansing can mean purification, erasure, punishment, or preparation. The imagination is not being decorated here. It is being scoured.
Released by Hydra Head in late 2012, with the vinyl commonly circulating as a 2013 object, the record carries extra historical weight because it became the label’s final release of new material during its original full-time run. That fact changes the temperature. Hydra Head was never simply a metal label. At its best, it functioned as a meeting ground for heaviness in multiple forms: post-hardcore, sludge, drone, math-rock, noise, industrial, avant-metal, and whatever else refused a neat room. A JK Flesh / Prurient split is not an odd ending. It is almost too fitting. Two artists who understand heaviness as condition rather than genre close the door by refusing closure.
The structure is beautifully simple. JK Flesh takes the first side with “Fear Of Fear,” “Deceiver,” and “Obedient Automaton.” Prurient takes the second with “Chosen Books,” “Entering The Water,” and “I Understand You.” Six tracks, two artists, roughly two halves of the same damaged sermon. On paper it looks balanced. In practice, the contrast is the point. Broadrick brings machinery, impact, and industrial beat architecture. Fernow brings psychological exposure, noise-field collapse, and the sick glow of confession without comfort.
The JK Flesh side feels like Broadrick continuing the work opened on Posthuman, but sharpened into shorter forms. “Fear Of Fear” is an almost perfect phrase for his music because fear becomes self-replicating. Not fear of a thing, but fear as a system, fear eating its own reflection. The sound has that familiar JK Flesh grammar: heavy electronic drums, bass pressure, damaged textures, industrial swing, and a body being marched through circuitry. Pitchfork heard Broadrick’s three tracks as concussive, with huge electronic drums and power-electronics abrasion, and that description fits the physical sensation of the side.
“Deceiver” is the Broadrick hinge. It feels connected to Godflesh without simply imitating it, a slow industrial dirge pushed through electronic mutation. The title opens a theological and psychological door at once: the deceiver as devil, system, addiction, self, machine, memory. Broadrick’s career has always had that undercurrent, the sense that rhythm can be an oppressive truth-telling device. A beat does not lie because it does not need to persuade. It just returns.
“Obedient Automaton” may be the most JK Flesh title possible. The human as programmed labor. The body as compliant machine. The worker, the listener, the user, the citizen, the addict, the believer: all moving because the system has already written the gesture. Broadrick’s heaviness has always been strongest when it makes repetition feel social rather than merely musical. This is not just a loop. It is instruction.
Then Prurient enters and the pressure changes shape. Dominick Fernow’s work often treats noise as emotional exposure rather than just sonic extremity. His best material understands that harshness can be intimate, even embarrassingly intimate, because the scream and the static are not opposites. They are two ways of failing to remain composed. On this split, Prurient does not simply answer JK Flesh by becoming louder. He changes the problem from machinery to psychic weather.
“Chosen Books” is a great title because it brings scripture, selection, secrecy, and obsession into the room. Books are chosen by whom? For what ritual? For what argument with the self? The Prurient side has less of Broadrick’s beat-driven architecture, but it is not shapeless. It builds through layers, loops, high-pressure tones, and emotional drift. Pitchfork described Fernow’s approach here as using loops and layers until the sound either falls apart or collapses inward, which is close to the feeling: Prurient does not build a factory. He builds a crisis inside language.
The closing track, “I Understand You,” gives the whole record its bruised grace. That title is almost unbearably direct after so much pressure: not “I defeat you,” not “I worship you,” not “I cleanse you,” but “I understand you.” Understanding becomes the final danger. It can be mercy, possession, manipulation, recognition, or the saddest form of intimacy. Contemporary reviewers singled it out as one of the most strangely beautiful moments in Prurient’s and Hydra Head’s orbit, and it makes sense as the record’s last breath. The noise does not vanish into peace. It briefly lets tenderness appear inside corrosion.
That is why this split works better than a simple collaboration might have. JK Flesh and Prurient do not need to merge into one style. They stand on opposite sides of heaviness and let Hydra Head’s closing frame hold them together. Broadrick’s side is the body under system pressure. Fernow’s side is the psyche under devotional pressure. One turns obedience into rhythm. The other turns confession into static.
Inside the Private Release sequence, this is a strong placement after the JK Flesh solo run because it opens a side passage into another major underground language. JK Flesh alone can become architecture, pressure, concrete, beat, sealed room. Prurient introduces a more unstable human voltage: shame, longing, worship, meltdown, romantic sickness, spiritual abrasion. The record’s title suddenly feels like a shared equation. Worship cleanses the imagination because worship destroys ordinary imaginative freedom. It replaces fantasy with fixation. It gives the mind an altar and demands repetition.
The Hydra Head ending also matters to the archive. Labels are not just companies. They are taste machines, friendship maps, argument structures, and distribution rituals. When a label ends, its final release becomes a statement whether anyone wanted that burden or not. Worship Is The Cleansing Of The Imagination carries that burden well because it refuses sentimentality. It does not say goodbye with a victory lap. It says goodbye by asking what heaviness can still mean after genre boundaries have stopped being useful.
As a blog post, this one feels like a node where several histories cross: Broadrick’s long industrial-metal-dub lineage, Fernow’s noise/power-electronics/emotional-exposure world, Hydra Head’s adventurous heavy-music catalog, and the post-2010 moment when underground heaviness was no longer tied to one instrument set. Guitar, drum machine, feedback, vocal, keyboard, bass pressure, loop, scream, label history, all of it can carry weight.
Worship Is The Cleansing Of The Imagination is not a farewell in the soft sense. It is a closing door with sound still leaking around the frame. The imagination is cleansed, maybe, but not healed. More like stripped to the nerve, rinsed in distortion, and left awake under the altar light.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.